Many subsequent clients have been at least partially based on it. Not all clients were originally built for BitTorrent, having added support for the protocol later on. There have been attempts to package malware as BitTorrent clients, probably due to the availability of many legitimate clients and users' willingness to try new ones.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of applications supporting the BitTorrent protocol. They are not all-inclusive nor necessarily up to date.

↑ 48.048.148.248.3 DHT permits use of trackerless torrents (with supporting clients) to resume normal torrents when their tracker is down. However, some trackers that register their users for keeping tabs on fair usage (such as a ratio of bytes downloaded to uploaded) may not reliably measure and update usage for users employing DHT.

↑ Localhost uses a DHT protocol called Kademlia to connect to peers that are running Localhost. Each peer has an index of directories and files that it shares with peers that it is connected to. No one peer is responsible for storing the entire directory structure, it is distributed among everyone. It is collaboratively maintained, edited and built upon by all users in a popularity based system.